Becauseservice-oriented
architecture (SOA) has emerged as a strategy many organizations are adopting in
order to respond more quickly and cost-effectively to customer needs, I really
wanted to understand what it was all about.

After reading many articles and talking with a number
of subject matter experts from IBM
Tivoli and WebSphere, here’s the information I pulled together.

Definition of SOA: Service Oriented Architecture
(SOA) is a method for breaking down large applications and business processes
into smaller “services” and a system for linking them on demand so they can be
reused to create new applications and business processes.

While not elegant or profound, this definition helped
me understand how SOA

provides organizations
with a dynamic infrastructure that allows them to break down large applications
and business processes into smaller, loosely-coupled “services” that can be reused
to create new applications and respond quickly to customer needs. The result is
a simplified, more powerful infrastructure in which services can dynamically
scale to meet changing organizational needs or workloads, while reducing cost
and management complexity.

With the tremendous value
SOA provides also come new challenges. Some of the challenges include managing
the complexity of deploying interdependent services, ensuring compliance with
multiple service level agreements for the same service, checking for the
proliferation of duplicate or overlapping services, and protecting a SOA
application and data from unauthorized access to name just a few. Meeting
operational goals in a SOA environment requires a new approach.

That’s where IBM
Service Management comes in. IBM
delivers offerings and services that span the entire service mangement lifecycle,
providing the visibility, control and automation needed to
effectively manage a SOA environment. IBM
Service Management solutions help organizations ensure compliance with multiple
service level agreements for the same service and track the interconnectivity
of loosely-coupled services to manage performance & availability.

It’s Good Friday, and it not only has been a good, but a GREAT week. Did you hear? IBM made the list of Top 50 social brands for March 2009: “The Social Radar Top 50 measures the most social brands by the number of unique topics of conversation. These brands are top of mind for consumers and bloggers today.”

If you haven’t noticed by now. IBM’s presence is growing more and more in the social media arena. Below are some of the hot topics lighting up this space this month.

Ewwww, that almost sounds as decadent as eating chocolate. If you’re into networking with SOA strategists and architects, learning about real-life examples and benefits of SOA in action, then this event is for you. Dressed in character as an Imperial Servant, an IBM virtual guide will lead a tour of Virtual Worlds and share how SOA can solve architectural challenges, adding immediate value and business flexibility.

This week IBM kicked off the Impact conference from May 3 - 8 in Las Vegas at the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino. In addition to focusing on Smart SOA and WebSphere, themes will concentrate on Smart, Economic Climate, Cost Optimization & Agility, Cloud computing, and Service Management.

The Impact conference is using social media in some of the most creative ways I’ve seen at IBM yet! They have a cool social media game where you can earn points for participating in Twitter, blogs, videos, etc. Hmm, I wonder how many points I can earn? Check out these links to learn more:

IBM Service Management is a big theme at the conference since Smart SOA makes business processes easy to change, but those changes create the demand for a Dynamic Infrastructure to be adaptive and support those business processes. IBM Service Management anticipates how business processes shift their pressures on the infrastructure, enabling the infrastructure to adapt quickly while enabling smart choices for a smarter world.

As Robert LeBlanc said at Pulse 2008, you can have Service Management without SOA, but you can’t have SOA without Service Management. Al Zollar, IBM General Manager of Tivoli Software, will give a keynote on May 5 during the Impact general session, discussing how a smarter planet requires a dynamic infrastructure based on IBM Service Management capabilities.Expect to hear announcements on ServiceManagementCenter for Cloud Computing, ITCAM for SOA Platform, and IBM Service Management for Healthcare.

IBM Service Management has the following activities at Impact:

18 IBM Service Management experts and executives will be available for one-on-one meetings with clients.

The excitement and amazing performances at the 2008 Beijing Olympics bring to mind the importance of getting a great start "off the blocks." Whether you're Michael Phelps, striving for your record eighth gold medal in a single Olympic games, or Usain Bolt smashing the world records in both the 100-meter and 200-meter sprints, how you start is often the difference between gold and silver, between winning and not.

Similarly, getting a great start with IBM Service Management can help our clients deliver gold medal service quality with surprising speed. We've all talked to our clients about how IBM service management enables them to deliver quality service, operational efficiency and innovation through visibility, control, and automation. Our clients "get it," yet many of them face the same challenge: "How can we get started?"

To help you answer that question and get your clients off to that fast start that they're looking for, we've developed the IBM service management entry points. The entry points are documented "starter projects" based on actual customer usage and previous implementation experiences. IBM Service Management professionals worked extensively with customers and key industry analysts to create this set of five entry points that, upon completion, minimize time to value and achieve practical business benefits.

The five IBM Service Management entry points are:

Discover: Understanding infrastructure and business dependencies Monitor: Tracking infrastructure health and compliance Protect: Ensuring infrastructure security and resilience against threats and disaster Industrialize: Streamlining workflows and processes for repeatable, scalable and consistent results Integrate: Aligning and integrating IT and business operations and objectives for optimal impact

Be sure catch the replay of the August 26 IBM Service Management Jam webcast, "Where to Begin: The Five Entry Points" featuring Zarina Stanford, Director, Tivoli Marketing. Zarina discusses how implementing one or more of the entry point projects can help clients get a great start "off the blocks" and address with urgency the high priorities of cost reduction and operational inefficiencies, improving their service quality and positioning themselves not only in the lead, but with the absolute best chance to win.

Welcome to the IBM Service Management blog.A variety of authors who represent different
parts of IBM will discuss a range of Service Management topics such as service
availability and performance, green IT, IT asset and financial management, IT
governance, service delivery and process, storage management, SOA management,
enterprise asset management, and service assurance for service providers.

We'll discuss industry trends and happenings, analyst
perspectives, new product and solution announcements, support and services
offerings, upcoming events, helpful resources, and heroes in the broader IBM
Service Management network. This blog provides multi-directional communication
with the public, and we encourage and look forward to your feedback, thoughts,
and questions. For extended sharing, check out our new IBM Service Management community.

I'm Tiffany Winman, the
IBM Service Management community and social media program manager, and my blog
topics tend to focus on communities, people, companies, heroes, and stories in
the broader Service Management and Tivoli "ecosystem" and the use of innovative social
technologies to facilitate online social networking and collaboration. When I'm
not blogging on group blogs such as Service Management, Tivoli, Pulse, and Web 2.0 Goes to Work,
you can join me in riveting conversation ;) on my individual blog.

Going to Pulse? Here's your chance to ensure you get the information you want and need!

IBM is hosting a one hour panel, "Tales from the Cutting Edge of Service Management," with IBM customer panelists at Pulse. Tell us which of the questions below would you like us to ask the panel the most? Are there any topics we missed?

Green

·What are you doing to have a more energy efficient data center?

·How have you determined your energy usage and what your energy management goals should be?

Virtualization / Cloud

·How are you managing the different business services and IT environments across a virtualized environment?

·How do you monitor all the different business services and IT components across a virtualized environment?

·How do you think Cloud Computing will affect your business?

Service-oriented architecture (SOA)

·How have you set up a SOA environment?

·Sixty-three percent of clients expect SOA application to impact their service management investment.

·What is your company doing to extend into that environment?

·How have you set up a SOA environment?

·Sixty-three percent of clients expect SOA application to impact their service management investment.

·What is your company doing to extend into that environment?

·How have you set up a SOA environment?

·Sixty-three percent of clients expect SOA application to impact their service management investment.

·What is your company doing to extend into that environment?

ITIL

·What benefits have you experienced in applying the ITIL framework in your organization?

Storage

·What steps are you taking to manage and store the proliferation of data?

·How do you ensure that the data your business runs on is where you need it and properly archived for accessibility and compliance?

·What steps are you taking to manage and store the proliferation of data?

·How do you ensure that the data your business runs on is where you need it and properly archived for accessibility and compliance?

Security

·How are you managing access control and security of your business critical systems?

·What are you doing to address data security?

Implementation of Service Management

·What has been your company's key challenge in implementing Service Management and how did you overcome it?

·Once I’m ready to make that leap and say, okay, let’s start down the path to Service Management, what should I plan to spend to do that?

·Do you see more value for implementing Service Management in any specific area of the business or is it consistent across the board?

·How did you develop your implementation strategy for Service Management?

·How was your implementation of Service Management particular to your industry?

·Could you talk about why a company might be inclined to start a Service Management initiative now rather than later?

Future of Service Management

·What changes do you see ahead for Service Management?If so, how?

Metrics

·What are the top key performance indicators against which you measure IT Operations success? for example: service uptime, improvement in MTTR, reduction in customer calls/incidents, SLAs with lines of business, internal SLAs, customer experience, etc

·What Service Level Management Metrics help to enable corporate governance?

Business Value of IT

·Do do you track IT costs per service?Is this information used for service planning/justification and/or chargeback of related costs to the lines of business?

·How does Service Management help your company to minimize the functional processes of technology and instead focus on how IT contributes to your core business?

·How do you ensure that your IT and business objectives are aligned?

·Do do you track IT costs per service?Is this information used for service planning/justification and/or chargeback of related costs to the lines of business?

Asset Management

·Have you seen an increase in asset up time as a result of your asset management implementation?

·What measures have you taken to ensure that your company's physical and IT assets are managed optimally, in a way that reflects business goals and strategies?

Benefits of Service Management

·How does Service management help your company achieve and maintain significant distinction in an ultra-competitive marketplace?

·How does Service Management help you to attract new customers, measure and increase the satisfaction level of customers you have?

·What benefits have you seen from using Service Management?

·How does Service management help your company achieve and maintain significant distinction in an ultra-competitive marketplace?

·How does Service Management help you to attract new customers, measure and increase the satisfaction level of customers you have?